The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 12: Words with Private Meanings

August 15, 2017

As has been noted several times in earlier posts, particular words may have private meanings for speakers while remaining vocabulary items of natural languages, not fabricated items in ad hoc or artificial languages (like Esperanto or those spoken by characters in theatrical or cinematic productions). Especially memorable for individual speakers may be names by which people refer to each other, such as pet names from early childhood or those exchanged by members of one’s immediate family. But nomina propria are not the only category of words that may carry a private meaning.

It is accordingly a reminiscence from childhood that has prompted this post. Driving from Manchester to Bennington (cities lying near one another in the state of Vermont), Y-H-B happened to turn on the classical radio station of Vermont Public Radio and heard the piano music his mother, Lydia Shapiro (1905-1983), often practiced at home and played in her concerts. It was Liszt’s “Au bord d’une source [Beside a Spring],” an especially powerful and beautiful exemplar of the composer’s consummate mastery of the lyric genre. But it was when the announcer identified the piece after the performance had concluded that the (utterly mundane) words of the French title exerted an especially powerful emotional effect on the listener, moving him to tears. They had brought back to mind, from many years of repetition in the distant past, the flawless French in which they had been uttered by the pianist whose playing of Liszt’s music had lain deeply embedded in her son’s psyche for all time.

One thought on “The Psycholinguistic Pathos of Everyday Life 12: Words with Private Meanings”

The well-known capacity that thoughts have — as doctors have discovered — for dissolving and dispersing those hard lumps of deep, ingrowing, morbidly entangled conflict that arise out of gloomy regions of the self probably rests on nothing other than their social and worldly nature, which links the individual being with other people and things; but unfortunately what gives them their power of healing seems to be the same as what diminishes the quality of personal experience in them.